Why Creating Things is Hard

The Creation Hierarchy

I’m kind of obsessed with hierarchies, and I mean that in several ways.

On the one hand I think they model certain concepts really well, and off the top of my head I have three more besides this one that I’d really enjoy writing about.

On the other hand though there are a lot of problems with hierarchical structures. For something like the file structure on your computer they might make sense, but they can also create bureaucracy and inefficiency in a lot of human systems. The solution is often found in structuring the proper network, which is a more decentralized way of distributing power and getting things done.

But I digress.

What I want to talk about briefly here is a specific hierarchy. A pyramid. One I first heard about from Casey Neistat. You can see his full video here.

It’s a simple three tiered pyramid used to describe the impact that creating something has on people and the world.

1. Create Something

You may have heard of something called the 1% rule, as it relates to Internet culture. What it says, essentially, is that in any kind of online community, 1% of users actually create original content. 9% will then contribute to that content, by commenting, reposting, liking… And the last 90% are just lurking. They see what’s going on, or skim it, but don’t necessarily interact with it any further.

Now this isn’t necessarily a hard and fast rule, since most people on, say, Facebook have posted or uploaded something and could arguably be categorized as creators.

But you could also look at it in another way. Most of the content that is being consumed online, is created by a tiny fraction of the user base. It isn’t uniform. You have a few people creating a lot of content relatively, and a lot of people creating very little. They mostly consume.

This is actually another great example of the exponential distribution, which I wrote about way back when. You have a few people making a bunch of content, and the majority of people making almost no content.

Because it’s a lot harder to create something well thought out and polished than it is to leave a snarky comment, or just look at something cool. It takes time, effort, skill, dedication, and a certain amount of thick skin.

When you create you open yourself up to criticism, ridicule or even just being ignored.

Which is actually how most creations end up. Take this blog, for example. Right now only about 10–15 people on average will read any given post. That’s not a lot at all. Most videos, articles, pictures and content generally doesn’t get seen by anyone.

Because let’s face it, a lot of content is just boring, average, not funny, not interesting, and not worth anyone’s time. It doesn’t add value to anyone’s day.

But I respect anyone who creates because I understand how difficult it is to do. A lot of people don’t start because they know they will suck at first, even though there’s no shame in that. Even if whatever is created sucks, the simple act of creating it puts someone in a very select group of people.

To me, there’s something almost magical about imagining something and then the act of materializing it. Bringing it out of your mind and into the real world.

I think it’s important to remember that for society, as a collection of interdependent individuals, to make sense and for it to be able to grow, people have to on average create more than they consume. That’s how wealth accumulates and can build on itself.

But not all acts of creation are equal. For wealth to accumulate (and I mean that more broadly than just money but productivity, skills, happiness) the things that are created have to have some kind of value.

Which brings us to the next level.

2. Create Something People Use

Creating something for yourself, or for a few people is nice, but it doesn’t have far reaching implications. It’s kind of neutral. It’s like the macaroni art you put on your fridge as a kid. It has no intrinsic value to anyone, other than to the few people who care about that kid.

So the next tier is to create something that other people will actually derive value from. Something people will use.

This is, once again quite broad. For example, the Mona Lisa doesn’t DO anything but you can argue that it has value. There is something to be said about the intrinsic value of art, or its ability to inspire, or the unforeseeable consequences one act of creation can have on all future acts.

But to simplify things, I’m going to be talking about practical applications. Every invention, gadget, and tool that we have today all add value of some kind to people’s lives.

Tools accomplish a certain task, allow for new behaviors, and bring what was once out of reach into our grasp.

Uber let’s us get around more quickly. Airbnb simplifies travel. Fake news sites help us validate our fears.

They all have some purpose they serve, and they get used because they are good at serving that purpose.

But this is an even smaller subset of creations because it requires more skill and more insights.

You have to solve a given problem and you have to do it well. There’s planning involved, the solution has to be explained to people, be marketed, take feedback, be iterated upon… It’s a huge process and can be very time consuming, which is why so many entrepreneurs have to endure sleepless nights.

To make matters worse, the creation needs to be significantly better than the next best alternative. Peter Thiel says in his book ‘Zero to One’ that for a new product to supplant an old one it should be at least 10 times better in some important dimension. Marginal improvements don’t get adopted because the cost of switching from what someone had previously needs to be worth it.

To use Guy Kawasaki’s example, people used to get ice from horses cutting it out of frozen lakes. The industry didn’t make a big leap because the horses got bigger, or the saws got more efficient. We figured out we could make ice in factories and deliver it that way. And then that evolved, not because the factories got better or the delivery system improved, but because we figured out we could make ice in our own homes in freezers.

Finding a new, significantly better paradigm is tough, and executing on it is even harder.

But solving the problem in a new way can be the easy part. Sometimes being aware of the problem, or defining the problem is even more challenging.

Because essentially what you’re doing is figuring out what you don’t know you don’t know.

People often don’t know what problems they have in the first place, or how much better off they could be.

No one ‘wanted’ and iPhone when it came out because they didn’t know how much better off they could be. The lacked that essential piece of imagination, but once they were shown what it could do and all the new possibilities, they quickly dropped their blackberries in favor of the new tech.

But it’s possible to create something even more powerful than something that’s just useful, because at the end of the day you are still creating something for people to consume. Whether it be something physical or intangible, useful creations are either consumed by people or consume people’s time or both.

Truly transformative creations allow other people to become creators.

3. Create Something People Use to Create

Let’s use video games as an example.

Games like Minecraft, Skyrim, Warcraft, Halo, GTA and Ark all have really strong communities and high brand value, and in part I think it’s because the games they built allowed players to create modded versions of the game for themselves. That versatility and freedom extended the amount of gameplay exponentially.

It gives those games a lot more ways to be entertaining and let’s people mold the game to fit their needs and interests.

Contrast that with other successes like Call of Duty or Fifa which comes out with a new edition every year or so. They are pretty rigid in their core mechanics so it limits what you can do with them. Those companies have to create new editions each year to stay relevant, but the games themselves don’t change much over time. The main selling point is improved graphics, which is tied to hardware, which in turn is tied to Moore’s Law. In other words, those games are easily commodified.

Warcraft 3, on the other hand, is still being played 15 years after it’s first release; an eternity in technological terms considering it was playable on Windows 98.

More broadly, platforms like Medium, Facebook, Photoshop, Microsoft Office, or even OS X are very successful because they allow people to become creators themselves. Not only do they provide value, but they are also robust enough to support intense use, they are flexible enough to allow a variety of unexpected behaviors, and they are simple enough to use that people don’t need to spend too much time learning how to use them.

Another great example are programming languages. Over time they’ve evolved to become more abstract and easier to use, but that process is very tricky. Javascript may be simpler to pick up and learn than C++, but its at the expense of performance considerations. A lot of type-checking has to be done behind the scenes in JS that saves the programmer time and gives them flexibility, but it costs CPU cycles and thus loses some robustness.

A less technical example might be Microsoft Paintbrush vs Adobe Photoshop. It might be easier to pick up Paintbrush and start doodling, but there’s only so much you can do with it. Photoshop is much more powerful, but it takes a lot of time to master it.

Tradeoffs.

A lot of these challenges can be summed up as problems of abstraction. In order for someone to be able to use your tool, they shouldn’t have to know how you created that tool necessarily.

I don’t need to know how to make a hammer to know how to hit a nail.

This isn’t to say having background knowledge is bad. Understanding geometry or metal-working isn’t going to hurt, and might make you better at hammering. But it isn’t and shouldn’t be necessary.

You want to make sure you have enough features for people to create what they want to create. But how much freedom should they have, without sacrificing abstraction?

Putting in the right constraints on behavior is key. Give people too many ways to do things or the ability to do too many things and you run into the paradox of choice. Give them too few and they can’t make what they want.

Instagram figured out a nice solution by having prebuilt filters, but it also allows people to mess with the image settings in a customized way if they want to.

Finally, the complexity or size of what can be built on top of the platform should be able to rival or surpass the complexity of the platform itself.

Take photoshop for example. Just because someone has mastered building the tools for it in whatever programming language they are written in, doesn’t automatically make that person a great photoshop artist. The amount and variety of uses photoshop has lets people run their own businesses using it. I bet the cumulative value of businesses that rely on photoshop surpasses the value of photoshop itself.

Or think about the Uber. Without smartphones, that company couldn’t exist. But once the market had enough phones on the market, once cellular data reached sufficient bandwidth, and when geolocation services became good enough, they were able to build out their platform.

Now, because of their driver network, the logistics data they’ve gathered, their corporate infrastructure and the technical talent they’ve acquired they are able to venture into building autonomous vehicles and are positioned in a way that can revolutionize that market.

So not only do you have to solve a problem people may or may not have known they had, and then create something really versatile and robust so they can create meaningfully, but you also have to do it in a way that all that complexity is hidden from view.

Creating something in this final layer is like creating good soil.

Soil is something we don’t think about very often. It’s always there, and all terrestrial life grows out of it. But there’s a lot that goes into healthy soil: water content, nitrogen, phosphorous, aeration, micronutrients, bacteria/fungi presence, root penetration, earthworms… All that is hidden from our view though. All you see is that if you plant a seed in really good soil, it will grow into a healthy plant without much work.

Creating something for others to create with is about providing the substrate for new things to grow out of. And these kinds of platforms need constant tending to, updating and iteration. It relies on taking community feedback, having deep insights about how people and technology interact, and clearly understanding what you are trying to accomplish.

But creations like this truly have the potential to have a global impact.